Sam Blumenfeld

The latest statistics report that 14 percent (32 million) of U.S. adults can’t read. Twenty-one percent (48 million) read below a 5th grade level. Sixty-three percent of prison inmates can’t read. And with compulsory schooling in America, all of these illiterates and semi-illiterates spent years in American schools learning to read. So obviously, something is wrong with the way reading is taught in American schools.

During the last election campaign there was much talk about the Latino Vote, the African-American Vote, the Asian vote, the Soccer-Mom Vote, the Jewish Vote, but no talk about the one vote that tipped the scales of this presidential campaign in favor of Obama: the Illiterate Vote.

If conservatives truly want to take the schools back, they will have to use a strategy that works from the bottom up. We must first start with the local school board, which still depends on the votes of local taxpayers. I have heard all kinds of discouraging stories of how conservatives managed to get elected to the school board, found out that they were impotent to change anything, and usually lost the next election because of negative publicity from the socialists on the board and the local newspaper, which generally sided with the town education establishment.

Seventy-five years of progressive public education has paid off big-time for the Democrat Party. The popular vote indicates that slightly more than half the electorate preferred a failed community organizer to an experienced problem-solver with a great economic vision for our future. Why? Because they don’t understand the difference between socialism and capitalism. Recently, when I asked a young computer repairman what was the difference between socialism and capitalism, his answer was: “A socialist government is for all the people. A capitalist government is for the few.” He had been well indoctrinated by his Marxist teachers.

While intelligent CEOs had thought they had found a way of reforming American education, they were totally unaware that left-wing, progressive educators were creating their own “reforms” designed to make things worse. With all our standards, tests, and accountability, and with No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, our literacy continues to decline. Only parents who are informed enough to teach their children to read at home can save their children from school-induced illiteracy.

Most Americans who have become aware of the academic and moral decline of public education tend to believe that the humanistic curriculum that now dominates the system is of relatively recent origin. They believe that the great emphasis now placed on the “affective domain” — all of those programs devoted to values, feelings, activities, behavior, group dynamics, sexuality, etc. — is somewhat new. Actually, it is far from new. The fact is that the groundwork for what we have in our schools today was laid in the 20th century by the Progressives who knew exactly where they wanted to lead America: to a socialist society.

Education reform in this country has essentially been a giant racket, deceiving the American people into thinking they are getting better education for the nearly $1 trillion spent in the last 50 years. But American children are worse off than they were before.

My American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language defines "vampire" as: 1. A reanimated corpse that is believed to rise from the grave at night and suck the blood of sleeping people. 2. A person, such as an extortionist, who preys upon others. My contention is that there is a kind of person who seems to combine aspects of the two types of vampires. They are educationists who work in groups to extort billions of dollars from the “sleeping people” called taxpayers for a bogus product called “education reform,” and they also suck out the brains and intelligence of the children who will be the subject of these reforms.

Like so many education reform initiatives that seem to arise out of nowhere, the Common Core State Standards is another of these sweeping phantom movements that have gotten their impetus from a cadre of invisible human beings endowed with inordinate power to impose their ideas on everybody.

One of the best-kept secrets in American education is that the 26 letters of the English alphabet stand for only 44 sounds. Learning to read with phonics programs helps students recognize the different letter combinations that form the various sounds.